CMD Space Rider
A retro DOS-style terminal space tunnel game. Pilot your ship through an endless neon warp tunnel, dodge obstacles, collect energy orbs, and chase the high score — right in your command line or browser.
Ctrl + click to play the game in the browser,
or read the quickstart to run it in a terminal.
Start here
Quickstart
The essentials, for getting it running now.
Features
What the game does, in one list.
Getting Started
Play in a browser, or install and run from source.
Usage
Controls, gameplay, and the five debug scenarios.
Development
Scripts, line endings, the test suite, and the probes.
Cheatsheet
Every key, flag and script on one page.
What it is
The game runs two ways from one codebase. The terminal build is a Node CLI
that draws a pseudo-3D tunnel with Unicode block elements and a 256-colour ANSI
palette, with no graphical window involved. The browser build is a single
self-contained index.html that reproduces the same game as a
canvas-based character grid, with no build step, no server and no
dependencies.
The two are kept in agreement by the test suite rather than by hand:
test/parity.test.mjs checks that both builds behave the same way,
and the measured figures quoted in this repository's comments, tests and
changelog come from a probe in test/probes/ rather than from a
scratch copy of the engine.